The Human Condition

A poem by SABEERA DAR, featured in the UCLU BME poetry collection Word Out.

Your body is a memorial of all that it once held

These scarred linings of ovaries collapsing into themselvescollecting damage as the months accumulateinternalising missed opportunities thesevessels form a nexus that lead nowhere,see you’re tainted by the all paths you took and could not evadethose irises are riot gear or the night before a raid,bones be feeling weightless but there’s so much sedimented therehair harbouring a legacymolecules spun upon a history even if it falls this ancestry won’t leave; it’s plastered in the

genes – that render your nightsconcentric, manic, spiralling out of sightperfectly erratic, your aberrations all align and youtried to decipherthe interspersed divine but it’s a pebble in the seaintractable beneaththis encrypted vastness just keeps coiling itself meekrefusing inspectiondespite the caricatures we speakprancing like ignorance with all the liberty we’re worth(the walls never permeate)how we emerge unto this earth,bathed in maternal blood,(it is the act of gasping for air from which we are derived)